The Dig: The Right to Have Rights Part I

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🗓️ 2 May 2018

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

What are rights worth when government denies people the very right to have rights? Political theorist Hannah Arendt recognized this loss of "the right to have rights" as millions of refugees found themselves without a national home in the wake of world wars. Human rights, it became clear, proved to be an empty promise for those excluded from citizenship—the foundational right to be a member of a political community. Today, this insight remains a critical one as a record number of humans transit the globe in search of economic and physical security, and far-right nativists and establishment liberals alike scapegoat them for the chaos and precarity unleashed by neoliberalism and war. As a result, migrants are condemned to second-class citizenship or even death in the Mediterranean and desert Mexican-American borderlands.

My guests today, Stephanie DeGooyer and Astra Taylor, just wrote a book about this for Verso, called the The Right to Have Rights. This is part 1. Part 2 will be posted on Thursday or Friday.

Thanks to Verso Books. Check out Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece by Teresa Thornhill versobooks.com/books/2713-hara-hotel. And Work: The Last 1,000 Years by Andrea Komlosy versobooks.com/books/2608-work. And please make a contribution to support the long-run viability of this show at Patreon.com/TheDig

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters on Patreon and by Verso Books,
0:06.4	which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.
0:12.8	One that you might like is Hara Hotel,
0:15.1	a tale of Syrian refugees in Greece by Theresa Thornhill.
0:20.0	This is a firsthand account of a Greek refugee camp and the stories of the refugees staying there.
0:26.6	Syrian Kurd, Juan Azad, left his home and family in Damascus in 2011 to flee military service under the al-Assad regime.
0:36.0	After several troubled years as a refugee in Turkey, he arrived in Greece by sea,
0:42.0	on the route taken by hundreds of thousands of his fellow
0:45.3	Syrians seeking a safe haven in Europe.
0:49.0	But as borders closed across the Balkans in early 2016,
0:52.8	Juan and his fellow Syrians found themselves blocked
0:55.8	from traveling any further.
0:58.3	Theresa Thornhill volunteered at Hara Hotel,
1:01.3	a makeshift camp on the Greece-Massidonia border.
1:05.3	An Arabic speaker, she met Syrians from all walks of life as she distributed clothing and
1:10.0	organized activities for children.
1:13.0	One of the Syrians was Juan, who would later walk through the mountains of Macedonia to safety
1:18.2	in Austria.
1:20.0	In Hara Hotel, Thornhill interweaves a narrative of daily life at the camp with
1:24.7	Jawan's extraordinary story, the recent history of the revolution in Syria, and an account
1:31.0	of the ensuing Civil War, painting a vivid picture of the predicament of Syrians
1:35.9	trapped on Europe's borders.
	...

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